President Obama and The National STEM Video Game Challenge

Nearly a year after President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate” announcement, our President is back with another initiative that will change the world of gaming. The National STEM Video Game Challenge is Obama’s latest move to advance education and gaming. For over 25 years, video game developers have been fighting for legitimacy. Even the idea of what we do as Games For Change fights for the belief that games can be more than pure entertainment. We can indeed teach, engage and create change through an interactive experience.

Now we have support from someone in a very high place, the President of the United States of America. President Obama believes that we can help motivate more children to learn subjects in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) by engaging them with games that are about those topics. Our President learned a lot from the Educate to Innovate campaign and there’s no question that the children of today learn in many different ways. We need to speak their language to educate them in subjects that will allow them to change the world.

Partnered with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media, the National STEM Video Game Challenge hopes to take children’s natural passion for creating and playing games and channeling them into inspiration to learn these important subjects. The great thing about this challenge is that prizes are being awarded not only to kids, but also to established game developers. Collectively the Youth Prize and Developers Prize will go out to the best and brightest games developed within the challenge.

It’s exciting to think that the nation is being challenge by our President to create not only better educational tools, but doing that through video games. This is a big step forward in what Games For Change can do and more importantly, what we all can do together to make the US education system more current, effective and engaging.

For more information on the challenge, check out the official National STEM Video Game Challenge website here.